The ultrastrong light-matter interaction regime was investigated in metallic and superconducting complementary split ring resonators coupled to the cyclotron transition of two dimensional electron gases. The sub-wavelength light confinement and the large optical dipole moment of the cyclotron transition yield record high normalized coupling rates of up to Ω R ωc = 0.87. We observed a blue-shift of both polaritons due to the diamagnetic term of the interaction Hamiltonian. arXiv:1408.3547v1 [cond-mat.mes-hall]

Metamaterials and plasmonics are powerful tools for unconventional manipulation and harnessing of light. Metamaterials can be engineered to possess intriguing properties lacking in natural materials, such as negative refractive index. Plasmonics offers capabilities of confining light in subwavelength dimensions and enhancing light–matter interactions. Recently, the technological potential of graphene-based plasmonics has been recognized as the latter features large tunability, higher field-confinement and lower loss compared with metal-based plasmonics. Here, we introduce hybrid structures comprising graphene plasmonic resonators coupled to conventional split-ring resonators, thus demonstrating a type of highly tunable metamaterial, where the interaction between the two resonances reaches the strong-coupling regime. Such hybrid metamaterials are employed as high-speed THz modulators, exhibiting ∼60% transmission modulation and operating speed in excess of 40 MHz. This device concept also provides a platform for exploring cavity-enhanced light–matter interactions and optical processes in graphene plasmonic structures for applications including sensing, photo-detection and nonlinear frequency generation.

Hybrid excitations, called polaritons, emerge in systems with strong light-matter coupling. Usually, they dominate the linear and nonlinear optical properties with applications in quantum optics. Here, we show the crucial role of the electronic component of polaritons in the magnetotransport of a cavity-embedded 2D electron gas in the ultrastrong coupling regime. We show that the linear dc resistivity is significantly modified by the coupling to the cavity even without external irradiation. Our observations confirm recent predictions of vacuum-induced modification of the resistivity. Furthermore, photo-assisted transport in presence of a weak irradiation field at sub-THz frequencies highlights the different roles of localized and delocalized states.The strong light-matter coupling regime [1, 2] is realized when the coupling Ω between photons and a material's excitation of frequency ω exceeds the losses γ tot of both components. An especially interesting situation is attained when quantum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field ground state give rise to the so-called vacuum Rabi splitting of the cavity polaritons. Solid-state systems [3][4][5] have recently proven to be instrumental in achieving the ultimate limit of this kind of coupling. The ultrastrong coupling regime [6-20], realized in the limit of Ω/ω 0.1, exploits the collective nature of the matter excitations [6,21,22] to achieve a peculiar situation where the ground state of the system is constituted by non-trivial quantum vacua [6].The (ultra-)strong coupling regime has so far mostly been investigated by interrogating the photonic component of the polariton quasi-particle weakly probing the coupled system with low photon fluxes [1-5, 7, 9, 10, 13-17, 19, 23-25]. Notable exceptions have been the measurements of the matter part of an exciton polariton condensate with an excitonic 1s-2p transition[26] and a transport experiment in molecules coupled to a plasmonic resonance [18].Recently we pioneered a new experimental platform, the Landau polaritons, to study ultrastrong light matter interactions [15,27] allowing to reach record-high nor-malized light-matter coupling ratios Ω/ω cav > 1 [28]. The inter-Landau level (cyclotron) transition ω c = eB m * (m * : effective electron mass) of a two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) under strong magnetic field is coupled to a complementary electronic LC resonator [29] at frequencies of 100's of GHz, which plays effectively the role of the optical cavity. This system is especially well suited to study the matter part of ultrastrongly coupled polaritons using low temperature magneto-transport.It was recently proposed theoretically [30] that such transport is actually driven by the bright polariton operator, i.e. the same operator driving the optical response.Here we find experimental evidence consistent with this picture, in which most tellingly the longitudinal resistivity ρ xx bears the signatures of the polariton branches.Further confirmation for polaritonic effects acting on magneto-transport is obtained by observ...

We propose an hybrid graphene/metamaterial device based on terahertz electronic split-ring resonators directly evaporated on top of a large-area single-layer CVD graphene. Room temperature time-domain spectroscopy measurements in the frequency range from 250 GHz to 2.75 THz show that the presence of the graphene strongly changes the THz metamaterial transmittance on the whole frequency range. The graphene gating allows active control of such interaction, showing a modulation depth of 11.5% with an applied bias of 10.6 V. Analytical modeling of the device provides a very good qualitative and quantitative agreement with the measured device behavior. The presented system shows potential as a THz modulator and can be relevant for strong light-matter coupling experiments.